Devils May Care
by moonswirl
Summary: Gleekathon, day 1683b: Having heard Santana's revelation, Sue Sylvester does a bit of soul searching and makes a move that could make or break the fledgling New Directions. - Berry-St series


_Started my daily ficlets to make the hiatus pass, then decided to keep going with a 2nd cycle, and then a 3rd, 4th, etc through 80th cycle. Now cycle 81!_

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**"Devils May Care"  
In Gen2!world: G2!Sue, G2!New Directions  
Berry-St series  
_(all series now listed under the communities tab in my profile)_  
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Sue Sylvester had long thought that she had succeeded in eradicating the Glee Club from McKinley High. It had been so, for the remainder of that school year, but then something had happened. Quinn Fabray, once upon a time her top Cheerio, up until that unfortunate pregnancy situation, had been spearheading a return for the fund-draining show choir. Sue had tried to put an end to this as well, before it could get too far, and to her own demise, she had forgotten just how cunning that blonde could be. She had secured a position for her rag tag team to perform before the school. Sue had not let herself get too concerned though. There were only seven of them, and she knew for a fact that wasn't enough. Also, she didn't think they had the talent needed to make it very far.

But then something had happened, and it brought her back to attention. They had started gaining members again, an eighth, ninth, tenth… All they needed were two more, and it put her in a position, to either walk away or take action.

She'd summoned Santana Lopez into her office. The way she saw it, with Quinn and Brittany already in there, it would only seem natural for Santana to follow. She could use that. She was intending on using the girl as her spy, simple enough.

And then Santana had spilled the beans. She'd told Sue the truth about what was really happening. Now Sue's eyes were wide open, and not at all in the way she would have liked.

Santana would end up joining the Glee Club, without her urging, and without her instructions to report back to her with anything she could use to tear them apart. The way she'd heard it though, she had been in this other Glee Club, the one that had survived, in that supposed other world. They had eleven now, just one shy from a competition-eligible set.

Sue would spend the next few days observing them all, these eleven. She wouldn't have known that there was anything different about them, mostly because she made it a point not to, not unless she had Santana's words playing at her thoughts. She thought about what she'd said, about waking up somewhere else and, now that Sue thought about it, they'd had a strange amount of fainting spells in this school in the past few months. And here she'd been wondering if the cafeteria workers had finally decided to strike back at all those kids…

So maybe it was possible that everything Santana Lopez had said, as crazy as it sounded, was the truth. Sometimes, the craziest things were not as crazy as some might think. Now there had to be a reason behind it all, because these things, while she'd only ever believed them to belong in the realms of cinema and literature, always tended to have a point, didn't they? And more often than not, it was some cloying attempt at course correcting the universe, to turn a Grinch into a saint, to repair the broken, find the lost…

And if she took even one second to try and figure out what would ever need fixing here, she would know… She'd done the breaking… some of it.

As much as anyone would want to go ahead and put all the blame on her, it wasn't her meddling that had left them the way they'd been, up until the start of this school year. It was the accident… That was the thing that had sent them careening off the edge they were grappling to.

She remembered all too well the events of that night. She'd been at home, polishing her trophies, when she'd gotten the call. All faculty and staff were being called into an emergency meeting, where they were informed of the tragedy. Three of their boys, all of them from the football team, had been involved in an accident. One of them, the driver, Noah Puckerman, had come out of it with relatively minor injuries. The second, Mike Chang, had lost a leg, and the third, Matt Rutherford, had died on the scene. They'd had to be told first, in order to prepare themselves for what would come next, to help the other students deal, in any way they could, with the loss of one of their own.

But she saw them now, those kids, who'd had a tough go of it, who were starting to move on, and in that instant, for all her intentions, she couldn't bring herself to do what she'd planned to do. Instead, she chose another course.

They were eleven. They needed one more. She thought back to the year before, to where they'd been headed before she'd put her foot down. They had all been struggling to come together, and then Schuester had tried to recruit someone, to help them rally… She remembered who that someone was.

"Hudson, my office, now!" she hollered across the hall. The boy had changed in the last year, in ways that had left him a poor imitation of who he'd once been. He'd lost that heart he once had. Maybe it was guilt, for not having been with his friends at the time, maybe it was Quinn Fabray again, and her dalliance with Puckerman… She didn't know what it was and she didn't care. She'd taken it upon herself to do something now, and she should have taken it for folly, but she was determined and she would see it through.

He came into her office, confused, but at the same time so sullen that it made her want to smack him.

"Why am I here, I'm not a Cheerio."

"I'd like to see you try out," she scoffed. "I would tear you a new one. But I didn't bring you here to talk about cheerleading, no, this is about something else."

"Like what?" he asked, frowning. She stared at him, letting out a breath. _Oh, what the hell…_

"Like Glee Club." He stared at her, disbelieving, and he stood to leave. "Hey, you sit yourself down, mister, I'm just getting started with you."

THE END

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**____********A/N: This is a one-shot ficlet, which means that signing up for story alert will not bring you any alerts.  
****In the event of a sequel, the story will be separate from this one. And as chapter stories go, they are  
************always clearly indicated as such [ex: "Days 204-210" in the summary] Thank you!**


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